BBCSO
Jessica Duchen
Outside the Royal Albert Hall blue-bereted devotees were handing out free EU flags. A great many people accepted them, while some with the Union Jack looked on askance and muttered. But inside, all differences were firmly put aside: every flag under the sun was there for the Last Night of the Proms party, along with the glitter poppers, an inflatable parrot and a model kangaroo. On the podium, a familiar figure: Sir Andrew Davis (pictured below), long-ago emeritus conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, owning the night again after some 18 years away, but as much at ease as if he’d Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This Prom had three pieces from times of social crisis, although only one faces its crisis head on. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring hides its pre-war angst behind a story of pagan Russia while Ravel’s post-war desolation is danced in decadent Viennese waltz time in La Valse. Berio’s Sinfonia, however, is very much engaged with the upheaval of the late 1960s, when, as today, fundamental questions were being asked about the very fabric of western society.This is in danger of making the whole thing sound less fun than it was. Although these are works of overriding seriousness, they all have a wit in Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The heart of Prom 33 was Brahms’s massive German Requiem, a piece that eschews Christian dogma and Day-of-Judgment terrors for a humanism focusing on consolation of the bereaved. It feels very much like a requiem for our times as much as the composer’s, and last night’s performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Richard Farnes, although very traditional in style, had a striking immediacy.But first came Thea Musgrave’s Phoenix Rising, the Proms premiere of a 20-year-old piece. In the year the Proms committed to increasing its representation of women composers it is also marking Read more ...
David Nice
Sometimes the more modestly scaled Proms work best in the Albert Hall. Not that there was anything but vast ambition and electrifying communication from soprano Anna Prohaska and the 17-piece Il Giardino Armonico under Giovanni Antonini, making that 18 when he chose to take up various pipes (★★★★★). By contrast the big BBC commission from Joby Talbot to write a work for much-touted guitarist Miloš Karadaglić and orchestra in the evening's first Prom left very little impression. Praise be, then, to Glinka and Tchaikovsky for showing what glittering substance is all about, and to Alexander Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Children’s concerts are a tricky business, but the BBC has hit on a good formula with its Ten Pieces project, now in its fifth year. Ten works are chosen for their diversity and accessibility, and these become the basis for education projects throughout the year, culminating in the Proms concerts. This allows the concerts to be more entertainment than education, which is all for the best, and the events remain deservedly popular, performed twice in one day, each time to near capacity audiences.In the first year, 2014, the concert ended with the appearance of a spectacular firebird puppet ( Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto combines the composer’s usual angst and nerviness with a sardonic humour, right from the opening bars, where the cello and orchestra seem to be playing in contradictory keys. At last night’s Prom, cellist Alisa Weilerstein played the opening motto not as a challenge, but as the continuation of a conversation already in progress. It was also very fast, which issued a different kind of challenge to the orchestra.The woodwind of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, heavily featured in this concerto as they so often are in Shostakovich, responded with some sparkling Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bernstein: On the Waterfront Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Christian Lindberg (BIS)There's much to enjoy in this Bernstein compilation, the first recorded collaboration between trombonist Christian Lindberg and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. The playing is great, the recording sensational, one of those rare discs which sounds good played back at any volume (I'd suggest listening to it at a high level). The sleeve art is an endearing image of a geezerish Lindberg posing, er, on the waterfront. Fans will always cherish Bernstein's 1960s analogue recordings of his Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You have to wonder why it has taken this long. Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking premiered in San Francisco back in 2000 and has since been performed over 300 times across the world, staged everywhere from Cape Town to Copenhagen. Only now, 18 years on, has this contemporary classic finally received its UK premiere at the Barbican in a one-night-only, semi-staged, concert-hall version of Leonard Foglia’s production originally created for Chicago, and most recently seen in full force in Madrid. Eighteen years.In the time it has taken Dead Man Walking to almost reach us in London, we’ve had two Read more ...
David Nice
This was an evening of Iberian highways re-travelled, but with a difference. At the beginning of 2016, the centenary of Spanish master Enrique Granados's untimely death, two young pianists at the National Gallery shared the two piano suites that make up the original Goyescas; finally last night at the Barbican we got the opera partly modelled on their deepest movements. And back in 2008 Josep Pons and the BBC Symphony Orchestra brandished the revised, full-orchestral 1925 ballet score of Manuel de Falla's El amor brujo rather than the intriguing chamber orchestra original, making a virtue out Read more ...
David Nice
Twelfth Night, Epiphany, call it what you will, is one reminder that there's continuity after the turn of the year. Another was Sakari Oramo's final Sibelius-plus concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra - a predictable triumph given that the previous four were all highlights of 2017, capping, at least for me, the "Rattle Returns" experience. Though an "in the beginning" myth was part of the programme, it seemed odd to start with the end, the miraculous one-movement Seventh Symphony. Still, C major marks a good way to kick off at the Barbican in January.That said, the symphony is rare, if not Read more ...
graham.rickson
The John Adams Edition Berliner Philharmoniker, conducted by John Adams, Gustavo Dudamel, Alan Gilbert, Kirill Petrenko and Sir Simon Rattle (Berliner Philharmoniker)That the Berlin Philharmonic can release a lavish four-disc collection of music by a contemporary American composer is testament to how much the orchestra has evolved since the Karajan years. Claudio Abbado kickstarted the ensemble's rejuvenation, the process continuing under Rattle’s leadership. John Adams was the orchestra’s Composer in Residence during the 2016-2017 season, and conducts a winning reading of his vast, Read more ...
David Nice
After Sakari Oramo's dazzling Sibelius rattlebag with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on the centenary day of Finnish independence, things weren't looking so good for Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia at half time last Thursday (★★★). Then along came the Four Lemminkäinen Legends, an early Sibelius masterpiece teeming with invention and strangeness, long a Salonen speciality. Salonen's own compositions have that ambition on steroids, at least since he discovered California after taking up the reins of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1992. Oramo's championship of his fellow Finn, seven years Read more ...